


a reason to treat you like I love you

by OfShoesAndShips



Category: Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell - Susanna Clarke, Ladies of Grace Adieu - Susanna Clarke
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-08
Updated: 2016-06-08
Packaged: 2018-07-12 05:41:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 7,586
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7087504
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OfShoesAndShips/pseuds/OfShoesAndShips
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Five times Joan and Tom were gentle with each other (and one time they weren't)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [erlkoenig](https://archiveofourown.org/users/erlkoenig/gifts).



> This fic (broadly) follows tumblr RP canon; you can find the logs here on AO3.
> 
> I've watched too much Outlander and it shows, I'm sorry.

_She slips through the corridors of Lost-Hope like a ghost, which she supposes she is. Her heart still beats, which may disqualify her; but it is a queer kind of beat, off key, off pitch, and she still remembers the way it felt when it stopped._

_But her heart beats still, here in these walls, in sync with the way the walls creak with their own shallow stony breaths._

_She remembers how it felt to wake up, or come to, being whirled about by the fairy gentleman with the hair like thistledown, and she remembers how badly he had taken to one of her sharp, albeit out of breath, remarks._

_She also remembers the dancer behind her laughing; how the gentleman, saying something snappish, had passed her off to him and taken a different partner._

_She remembers the sardonic way the second dancer had smiled, how he had bowed obnoxiously low over her hand and called her what she since learnt was the Sidhe word for stranger. How she had snapped back at him. How they spent the whole rest of the dance arguing so fiercely that when the music stopped they kept going, how the thistle-king cursed them both and called the guards to carry her away._

_And now she can almost hear the music again, in the still, quiet corridors, and she hopes like hell her dancer is waiting where he said he would._

 

\--

 

She hesitates to call him different. She supposes he must be, for her to trust him this way, but he looks and acts and sounds the same as all the fairies that have walked past her and sneered at their King’s latest prize.

She is not much of one, she knows that. She is a poor specimen of a human, and no amount of magic can get the rope scar from her neck. She is small and mouthy and not in the least scared by that there Thistle-King; so much so that she only spent a little more than three days as his favourite. She wonders, though not giving the thought much weight, if he is the same. A temporary favourite, mouthy, arrogant, demanding. She wonders if the light in his eyes is desperation, as it is in hers. She wonders if she only hopes he’s different because she wants to be allowed to touch such beauty (she is under no illusions as to her own attractiveness. She has her charms, but to someone such as he- she stops that thought in its tracks, and curses herself for being predictable. She’s above being tempted by the sharp smiles of handsome men. She’s not nineteen anymore, for Christ’s sake.)

He had smiled at her, and she holds onto this when she’s alone at night in her room, wondering how she can use it. He gets a look in his face when they argue that makes her wonder, and fuck it all she’s weak for that, too.

 _You are a grown woman, Joan Childermass_ , she says to herself, _stop acting like a besotted girl._

(He had smiled when no-one else had smiled and then they argued so ferociously that the guards had appeared to drag them apart and she had felt like an equal for the first time in so long-)

 

\--

 

“Everyone will be leaving soon,” he says, after she has finished laying the fire in his room, after she has finished shouting at him for – she can’t even remember what for now. She is standing exactly halfway over the threshold; there is a slight ripple in the stone and she can feel it pressing into her arches. There is a part of her mind that still thinks this is a dream, that she is yet to wake up and hang, and so sometimes she focuses on the tiny things to shut it up.

She turns, very precisely, so that she is standing in exactly the same place. He is lounging back on the bed, supporting himself on his elbows.

He smiles, and she notices the sharpness of his teeth.

“Aye,” she says, “But beyond me having less work to do I can’t see how that’s any of my concern.”

The flicker in his eyes is there and gone in a moment, but she sees it and files it away as one of those moments to hold close in the dark. She’s riled him. There’s something addicting about that.

“Close the door.”

“No.”

He twitches one hand and she steps forward just as the door swings shut behind her. She doesn’t bother to hide her grin at having thwarted him. The fire has warmed the room far too quickly for comfort but still she feels goosebumps rise.

He gets up, walks very slowly across the room towards her, and stops close enough that she has to crane her neck to look him in the eye.

“It is your concern,” he says, “Because it is a distraction.”

It’s not that she doesn’t understand his meaning. It’s that she can’t believe he could possibly mean it.

“What?”

He reaches out, tucks her hair behind her ear with a cruel but somehow perfunctory little flash of teeth. He draws his fingers along her jaw, and if he thinks she’s finding this threatening he’s very much mistaken.

“I don’t believe you’re so enamoured of laying fires that you won’t take the chance to run when it’s presented, sassenach.”

She doesn’t blink, swallows. His voice is just soft enough that she feels herself wavering, so very tempted to trust him. But because she is thirty-one, and not nineteen, when she reaches up she takes his hand and twists. “Touch me again and I will break your wrist.”

The smile again. “What about my side of the bargain?” he asks, in a tone she has heard too many times.

She lets go and slaps him clean across the face.

 

\--

 

She storms back to her room, vibrating with anger, and buries the part of her mind that whispers that this is the first time she has felt entirely alive since they put a rope around her neck.

 

\--

 

He is standing in her room when she gets there, his back to the door, peering out of the small window.

“You’re exactly like the rest of them,” she snaps to smother her surprise, “Callous, self-centred, cruel-”

“I’m nothing like the king, and I resent the implication. At least rail at me for crimes I’ve actually committed. There are plenty to choose from.”

The lightness of his tone cuts through her anger and almost makes her laugh, so she swears at him.

“Do you, or do you not, want to hear my _actual_ proposal?” he asks, turning as precisely as she had, a wry tilt to his mouth.

She reaches behind her and pushes the door closed.

“I’m listening,” she says.

 

\--

 

(After that conversation, a little dreaminess falls away with every breath, and as much as she curses herself for it she can still feel the warmth of his fingertips against the shell of her ear.)

 

\--

 

He is already standing at what was once the water-door when she gets there, and in the moonlight he looks so classically ethereal that she has to stop and pinch the inside of her elbow just to check she isn’t dreaming. She has long got used to light in this place being different, blue cast and watery, but it has always looked strange to her until now.

“You’re late,” he says.

“It may surprise you to learn that finding an opportune moment to slip away is rather easier for a guest than a servant.”

He doesn’t rise to the argument. He surely must be able to see the tension in her, hear the slight unsteadiness in her voice, and as much as she likes a fight she’s glad for his seeing that now is not the time.

He shrugs off her snarled reply, and holds out his hand.

“Come,” he says, “It’s time.”

She feels frozen. All of a sudden she feels entirely unable to trust him, even though in all truth he has given her no reason not to.

“Joan,” he tries, and she hears him let the slightest desperation into his voice.

She takes his hand.


	2. Chapter 2

He does not often sleep, she discovers. He prefers to wander his gardens with a book in his hands, sometimes reading, sometimes talking to the flowers and the trees. Once she thought he was talking to the architecture, but when she asked he looked at her like she was being stupid and motioned to the moss.

She understands at least some of the impulse. She herself is still not used to the size of his room, his bed – she thinks just his wardrobe is the size of the room she raised John in. Most nights she sleeps on the windowseat, instead, which has the advantage of looking down on his favourite garden; she is not too proud to admit that when it’s proving difficult for her to sleep she watches him and amuses herself by imagining what he’s reading. Perhaps Shakespeare, perhaps a horticultural treatise. As she’s drifting further into sleep, she imagines both; _Midsummer Night’s Dream_ with a soliloquy on the correct placement of privet, _Henry V_ with a sonnet on the care of wisteria. She doesn’t mind the habit of his too terribly; she’s not the kind of woman that would need his presence overmuch. Besides, spending too much time together leads to an argument and anger wakes her up, so it’s perhaps best that he wanders most nights.

She twists her ring around with her thumb, and she doesn’t smile but her eyes go very slightly soft.

She’d not thought she was the marrying kind, either. Not when he is still so – she shares her home with either a stranger or someone she knows better than her own bones, there is no in-between.

Somewhere far below, a door slams.

It must have been a treatise. Shakespeare makes him laugh, if it’s a tragedy, or look intensely disgruntled if it’s a comedy. _How did they survive the play when they’re all so idotic,_ he asks, every time. She hums in agreement and this, apparently, satisfies him. But horticultural treatise, especially Argentine ones, make him rant and pace and dig out the good brandy. There’s no soothing him out of those, but she’ll happily drink with him and nod along until he tires himself out.      

The door opens, and she immediately holds her hand out for a glass.

“…thyme, he says. Thyme. _I ask you_ ,” Tom says, mid-sentence as always, and pushes a half-full glass into her hand.

“Goubert, is it this time?”

Tom sniffs, which means yes, and throws himself down on the bed without spilling either the glass or the bottle. After a moment he sits up again, looks at the bare mattress, and then looks at her.

“You’ve stolen my sheets.”

“I’m using _our_ sheets, ta muchlike.”

“Once a thief, always a thief,” he grumbles, and she waves her left hand at him.

“Can’t steal your own things, love.”

He looks at her, an eyebrow raised, and then stands up. He puts the bottle down on the floor, though he doesn’t relinquish his glass, and then with a movement that surely can’t have been entirely mundane yanks the sheets off her.

“Oi!” she yells, tumbling off the window seat with the momentum of her sheets and only just managing to land on her feet.

She reaches for the sheets and he smirks, holding them above his head and sipping his brandy in a disgustingly smug fashion.

“This is foul play,” she says, folding her arms. She rests her own brandy on one forearm; like him, she doesn’t see the point in wasting the stuff by spilling it on the rug.

“This is tactics,” he replies, so she kicks him in the shin.

He topples, falling against the bed with a highly gratifying look of surprise. He still doesn’t spill the brandy, but the he lets go of the sheets and they fall against the mattress with a _fwump_.

She throws herself onto the bed after him, and he rolls over, grabbing her chin.

“Foul. Play,” he says, very seriously and very close.

"Tactics,” she says, just as seriously, just as close.

After a second’s pause, they start laughing; it echoes off the vaulted ceiling, and every time they start to calm down it sets them off again, until all the walls are ringing with it and both of them have tears in their eyes.

“Joan,” he manages between bursts of what she can only call giggles, _“Joan.”_

“Are you drunk already? Must be good bloody brandy.”

Tom shakes his head, but he takes a gulp of it and affirms that yes, it is bloody good brandy.

She laughs at the way he says _bloody_ , like it doesn’t fit on his tongue, and this derails him into rolling his eyes and making the bed underneath them – which feels very strange but which is over quickly – with a quick burst of magic that she is by now acclimatised to. His magic is soft but sticky, like sap and elderflower, late dawns and brief rains, and is just as close and comfortable to her now as his quilts and his brandy and his window-seats.

“I think I’m going to sleep,” he says, in the same way that people would say something like ‘I’m going to Mytholmroyd,’ ie, with some confusion and trepidation.

“Well since you disturbed mine with your door-slammings and sheet-stealings, I think I’ll join you.”

“I did no such thing,” he says, and her disgruntled huff sets him off laughing again.

 

\--

 

(She wakes, some hours later, to see his eyes wide open and unseeing, to hear him mumbling in Sidhe, and she realises why he sleeps so seldom. She reaches out and pulls him close, humming the lullaby she used to sing to John, and he settles just as dawn begins to inch through the window.)


	3. Chapter 3

When she sees him, she realises just how long it’s been since she last did. Of course, they have company and she’s not quite sure how she feels about him at this particular moment, so she doesn’t run up to him and throw her arms around his neck, even though it would shock Norrell and rile him.

He raises an eyebrow, when he catches her eye, and she finds that for once she can’t read his expression.

Norrell steps between them, clears his throat. “Sir, this is Mrs Childermass. Mrs Childermass, Thomas Brightwind.”

“Hello, sassenach,” he says, and she hasn’t seen that sharp smile since Lost-Hope.

It makes her go cold, and so when she says _we’ve already met¸_ she says it with weight of all the bitterness she’s long since stopped feeling.

 

\--

 

He looks – not tired, she has seen him tired, but…perhaps wilted is the word. Faded, not quite himself. He has been looking at her, all the time she has been looking at him, and she wonders what he sees. It has been a rough ten years in Fairie alone; she wonders if the years show. She wonders, too, if it really would have riled him if she had run up and thrown herself at him, and then she sees the ring on his thumb and knows. She reaches up to touch hers on a chain around her neck, and knows he sees that, too.

(And then they are back to snapping at each other, almost as if no years had passed at all.)

 

\--

 

She leads the party, if only by default; there is tension in Norrell’s eyes when he looks at Tom and as much as she understands why, she has to fight against the urge to defend him. And so, because Norrell trusts her that much more, she is the one he follows through Fairie. Tom takes up the rear; apparently, Norrell does not trust him with the road but he trusts him with his back. She smiles to herself, thinking with only a little ruefulness that Tom does have a way about him that encourages trust, however miniscule. As topsy-turvy as it is, she feels safer with him there. She’s picked up enough magic of her own in all these years that she can keep herself and Norrell mostly unharmed, but she has only had a few decades’ experience with this place – Tom has had centuries. She ignores the fact that she knows this is only a justification, that even had it been vice-versa she still would have trusted him.

It is a longer, harder journey than any of them will later relate; she is avoiding the King’s Roads as much as possible, and equally so with the major Fairie roads. But this means they are travelling through wild country, dangerous country, and since every flash of magic risks alerting the King to their presence they have to go carefully and quietly.

Norrell stops on the edge of one of the many expanses of moor she is leading them through, and when she turns to look at him he looks about to fall over but a little relieved.

“I am familiar with this place,” he says, and she nods.

She sees Tom open his mouth to speak, but he catches her eye and stops.

“Then we rest,” she says.

“Not for long.”

“Did I say anything about whiling away the evening on the moor’s edge?” She isn’t sure if she means it as bait or not, but either way Tom doesn’t take it. She gathers up her skirts and sits down on the tough, greyish grass, a little away from Norrell. But for the windlessness and the watery colours it could have been one of her own East Riding moors, and for a fleeting second she feels like she could reach right through; as if the air was thin enough to step through and go home.

There comes the cracking sound of strong boots on dead heather, and Tom sits down beside her; a respectable distance away, since they have both company and history, but still in reach.

 

\--

 

He is silent, all through the walk across the moor and most of the way through the forest on the other side; it is not the Thistle-King’s woods, yet, though she can smell the sickly scent of the rotting trees of Lost-Hope on the breeze that is just now picking up.

“It’s spread,” she says, and Tom hums in worried agreement. Norrell makes a noise as if to ask _what_ , but stops himself almost immediately.

“Tom,” she says, trying to say everything she’s thinking with just his name.

He looks down at her, and then back at Norrell.

“Stay there,” he says to him, and then takes her hand and pulls her off the path.

 

\--

 

He doesn’t take her far, just far enough to be out of sight, but he doesn’t let go even when he stops pulling her around.

The trees are close, and bending closer; their bark glows with a greenish-grey light, like a strange kind of moonlight, and it pools in the hollows of his cheeks and under his eyes, making him look even more gaunt than he already is.

“Joan.”

He doesn’t follow it with anything; he looks like he can’t decide what to say. Still, it makes a change from the pointed _Mrs Childermass_ -es he’s been throwing at her since they began the journey.

She feels like looking away; she wants to study the mossy mulch under her feet and not have to face him, and it feels like giving in but she can’t look him in the face. Not after hearing him say her name in that voice. Not after seeing him for the first time in so long.

She half expects him to lift her chin with his free hand but he doesn’t; instead his grip on her wrist softens, his hand sliding over hers like he’s going to tangle their fingers.

She screws her eyes shut tight and opens them again, lifting her head to look at him. She opens her mouth to speak but he interrupts her.

“Did you ever truly think I was different?”

“I’ve never been quite sure,” she says, and he laughs, a thin and unamused sound.

After a long moment, he lets go of her hand.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please be warned there's semi-graphic-but-not-really medical stuff in this chapter.

The knocking comes late on, long after the iridescent blackness that passes for night in this place has fallen. The children are upstairs, hopefully asleep, and she is rocking herself half to sleep in the kitchen chair, mending in her lap and a kettle on the fire. Her eyelids are beginning to drop, her hands growing clumsy; she is just about to pick up the mending again in the hopes of her frustration waking her up when there comes a sudden, insistent knock on the front door.

She curses to herself and gets up, leaving her mending on the chair and running to the door. Edith has been unsettled for a week straight; if this idiot, whoever they are, wakes her up after she’s only just managed to get to sleep then they will be having words.

She pushes her hair out of her face, running her hand through it, and yawns into her wrist before opening the door.

“What kind of time d-” she starts, and then stops. Standing on the stoop, wavering slightly as if he is only managing not to fall into the doorframe by force of will, is- “Tom,” she says, and as soon as she says his name he topples, falling so hard against her that she staggers, her arms going around him automatically. There is a warm dampness under his ribs and when she lifts one hand it comes away sticky, and even in the low light of the hallway she can see the dull golden gloss of his blood.

“Christ, Tom, what happened?”

He mumbles something into her shoulder, but his voice is ragged and she isn’t even sure he’s speaking English. She shifts his weight a little and shuts the door with the back of her wrist so she doesn’t get blood on the doorhandle, warding it with a pointed glare.

“Come on,” she whispers, manhandling him until she gets his arm around her shoulders and her hand under his arm. He’s far lighter than she expects, but he has over a foot on her and it makes him difficult to manoeuvre even the few steps to her living room. He makes a quiet, pained noise, and it curdles in the pit of her stomach, making her hold him tighter.

“If you weren’t such a contrary b-”

“Ma Joan?” comes a small, tired voice behind her and she sighs.

“Go back to bed, Edith.”

“But Ma–”

She twists to look at her, and grits her teeth against another sigh. Edith looks so tired she’s almost wilting, but there’s an alert kind of worry in her eyes and in her hands where she’s fiddling with her nightdress. 

She gives in. She can do many things, but wrangling two stubborn fairies at once is beyond her. “Alright. Open this door for me and then fetch me a bowl of hot water and some cloths. Wake Matthew if you need help carrying them.”

Edith nods, and then runs forward to open the living room door so she can hustle Tom through it.

Inside, she half-carries Tom to the sopha where he groans and slumps sideways; she chews on her lip as she looks at him, a little bitter rage pulling at the base of her spine, but she crushes it and goes to light a few candles so she can see the state of him.

She falls to one knee in front of him and gently shifts him so he’s sitting straight, lifting his chin. He blinks blearily at her, not really focusing, and his left eye is swelling up so far that he can barely open it. There’s a smear of blood across his cheek and his lip is split and swollen. The door creaks as it opens and she looks up, startled, but it’s just Edith with a bowl in her hands and cloths over her arm.

“Thank you,” she says, gesturing to the floor next to her.

Edith puts the bowl down where she’s pointing and lays the cloths down on the sopha next to Tom, before scurrying off. She hears the stairs creak and thanks whatever higher power that she’s going back to bed without a fight.

Now she has the tools to deal with it she lets her eyes fall to his chest and the blood that soaks his shirt. A great gash runs all across his side and up into his chest, and he hisses when she presses the tips of her fingers against it. She can’t quite see through the slowly caking blood but it looks as though there’s burning at the edges and her stomach twists. Iron. She pushes herself up to her feet and goes into the kitchen to fetch scissors from her mending basket. When she returns he seems slightly less hazy, and when he looks up she can tell he’s seeing her clearly.

“Joan,” he says, his voice hoarse, “You have a fairy daughter.”

She lets him see her smile and sits next to him on the sopha so she can start cutting through his shirt.

“I have several. And some fairy sons, too.”

“Some people collect paintings. Or sculpture.”

“Can you really see me in a house full of bits of marble?”

“I can see you in a house _of_ marble. Or rather a tower.”

“Don’t try to flirt when I’m ruining a good pair of scissors trying to help you.”

He shoots her a grin that’s too weak to be rakish, and then yelps as she begins to peel his shirt away from the wound.

She doesn’t look as his face as she pulls the fabric away, and tries not to listen to the way he’s breathing too quickly through gritted teeth. Eventually the shirt falls away and she helps him push it over his wrists.

Then she dips a cloth in the water and begins very carefully to wipe away the dried blood and the sluggish streams of blood that have started up again where pulling the shirt off has taken off the scabs. His breathing starts to sound choked and she forces herself not to listen to that, either. It’s little solace to her when she realises she was right; with the scabbing cleaned off she can see the way his skin peels back around the gash, ash-black and stippled like a powder burn.

“You look like you got on the wrong side of an ironmongers,” she says, picking up a clean cloth and carrying on wiping at the wound.

“Feels like it.”

Something in the wound catches her eye and she bends closer. She curses when she realises what it is.

“There are pieces of iron in it. God, Tom, how did you even manage to get here?”

“Carefully,” he says, worryingly drowsy, and she swats very lightly at his knee.

“I’ll have to go and get tweezers. Stay awake for me, Tom.”

He nods and grimaces as he does, and she glares at him before stepping out into the hallway.

Damn him. Damn him and his self-destructiveness and damn whichever fucking bastard stuck him so full of iron that he can’t even see straight.

She slips into the kitchen and gets her medical bag from under the sink. Most of it is unguents and salves, the kinds of things she needs with seven unruly children running around, but she has tweezers and bandages and that will do – well, it will have to. She’ll make it do.

She doesn’t run back to the living room; he’ll hear, and the state he’s in – the state he seems to think he’s hiding – she has to stay as calm as she can. She slips back into the living room, almost too scared to look at him; but look at him she does. He’s fallen sideways, his head against the arm of the sofa, and for a terrified second she thinks he’s unconscious - but then he raises his head and mumbles something in Sidhe.

“Shush,” she whispers, stroking his hair as she sits next to him on the sopha, “It’s alright.”

She pulls her hand back with some reluctance and opens her bag. Just as she’s about to pull out her tweezers, he grabs her wrist.

“Joan.”

“You’re going to have to let go of me if you want that wound cleaned.”

“I need your help.”

“I know you do, love. But you need to let me-”

He shakes his head. “Not that. You said to come to you if things-” he breaks off, and she sees for the first time the tiny beads of sweat on his skin. She reaches out with her free hand to touch his forehead, feeling his temperature. He’s feverish, she doesn’t have time to dawdle-

“Tom, please, let go.”

He does, but in doing so his hand goes worryingly limp, as if all his strength has left him in a rush. 

She breathes out and picks up her tweezers in shaking hands. He isn’t bleeding much any more, but she picks up one of the cloths anyway, to dab at the wound as she digs the shards out.

There are so many; every piece she digs out she drops onto the table where they thud, unnaturally heavy. She counts them as she does, the rhythm matching the hoarse rattle of breath in his lungs. _One, two, three, four, five._ By the time she hits twenty a stillness had fallen, their breathing loud in a space that is slowly shrinking around them as the candles begin, one by one, to reach the end of their wicks. At thirty his breathing is easing and her arms are shaking with fatigue. At thirty-five she breaks off, closing her eyes tight against the tension knotting in her throat. She feels him shift, and then the warm touch of his thumb sweeping across her cheekbone.

“Shh, sassenach.”

She smiles, feeling it tremble at the edges, and blinks her eyes open.

He starts to pull his hand away and she reaches up to stop him, twining her bloodied fingers with his. “Tom.”

He opens his mouth to say something and evidently thinks better of it, letting his head drop forward to lean his forehead against their clasped hands.

After a moment, she tries to pull back and his grip tightens. “Tom, I haven’t finished.”

“Shush,” he says, his voice muffled by their hands.

“I’m going nowhere; you don’t have to hold so tight.”

“Perhaps you should.”

“Perhaps we should have this conversation later, aye?”

He nods jerkily and lets go of her hand, turning so she can go back to picking at the wound.

“Thirty-six,” he whispers as she pulls another out, and she looks up, startled.

“I didn’t think I’d been saying that out loud.”

“You weren’t.”

She gets to forty before she’s satisfied the wound is clean, and he sits still and quiet while she sews his torso back together. He even turns obligingly while she runs bandages around his chest, and when she dares look up into his face he looks much less ill, though exhausted. She feels his forehead just to check and his temperature is now only a little raised; sick still, but not worryingly so.

“There,” she says, smiling as much as her exhaustion will let her.

“Thank you.”

She mock-gasps. “Surely my ears deceive me! The great Prince Thomas Brightwind, expressing gratitude?”

He rolls his eyes, but there’s a slight smile pulling at the corner of his mouth. “Hush, woman.”

She shakes her head in something like fondness and cleans her tweezers off in the bowl of now cool water, before she remembers the blood on his face; she dampens the final cloth, and very gently cleans the blood off his cheek.

“There,” she repeats, “All done.”

Cleaning up can wait until the morning, she thinks, standing up and offering him a hand. He doesn’t take it but stands up anyway, hissing as he does.

The situation seems to dawn on him once he’s looking down at her, and after a moment’s awkward pause he blinks, a distant look coming into his eyes.

“I should go,” he says

“You’re doing no such thing.”

“There are people looking for me.”

“The house is warded. They won’t find you here.”

“Your petty enchantments are nothing! I have already lingered here too long-”

“My ‘petty enchantments’ have kept me out of sight of his infernal majesty for nigh on thirty years! It won’t stretch them to keep you safe for a night.”

“Joan-”

“You’re staying.”

It’s only when he gives in without another word that she realises how tired he still is. He follows her quietly enough, out of the living room and up the stairs, and barely says a word of protest when she ushers him into her room and tosses a nightshirt at him with a stern invocation to put it on so he doesn’t dislodge the bandages with his incessant tossings and turnings.

“I do not-” he starts, and she glares at him over her shoulder while she strips down to her shift.

He puts it on, only rolling his eyes a little, though he yelps loud enough while he does that she regrets not at least trying to help him. Not that he would have let her, but it’s the principle of the thing.

She slips under the sheets, intentionally turning her back to him, and after a moment the mattress dips.

He stays there, sitting on her bed, for such a long time that she’s just beginning to drift into sleep when he finally shuffles under the sheets. She can feel the warmth of him behind her, and she has to turn to face him just to stop the memory of the last time she had felt that warmth from knotting in her throat and stinging at her eyes.

He’s pulled the sheets up almost far enough to cover his eyes and she laughs, reaching out to him.

He flinches back and her hand falls, landing in the space between them on the mattress.

After a moment, she says, “I said to come to me when your regrets got too heavy to bear.”

“You wouldn’t have said so if you knew the whole of it,” he whispers, just barely loud enough for her to hear.

This time, when she reaches for him, he doesn’t flinch.

“Yes,” she says, running her thumb over his cheekbone in a mirroring of his earlier touch, “Yes, I would.”


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Those of you who follow Joan's RP blog might recognise this one.

She nestles herself in against the wall, pulling her cloak around her. It’s a moonless night, and she can’t see anything in the glass but her own shape, cast by the sconces out in the corridor. Still, time was she knew every window-seat in all his towers, and when she closes her eyes she can see the grounds below cast in the warm, viscous light of the setting sun. She knows how the walls – drystone, slate – would glow purple, how the roses would strain for the last drops of light, how he would chase the dying light so he could finish his chapter before she opened the window and shouted at him to come in.

She hears footsteps just outside in the corridor and curses quietly. Of course he would come find her, she thinks, remembering a night not quite so long ago as it feels, running from the tower in the moonlight as if she were the heroine in a fairy tale. Or perhaps the villain. She’s never been quite sure.

The footsteps slow down as they get nearer the little windowed alcove she’s sequestered herself in, and she wonders if he can sense her, or if he just never forgot her as much as she expected him to.

She catches sight of him in her peripheral vision then, and looks up to see him leaning against the arch that leads into the alcove.

“Don’t you dare,” she says from her perch on the windowsill, back pressed to the wall and her knee cool from the touch of glass.

He purses his lips in that way he has when he’s pointedly not laughing, and steps properly into the alcove to peer out the window as if it’s not the middle of the night and there is actually something to see.

“Looks to be weather coming,” he says, in a loose imitation of her accent, and she reaches out one leg to kick him.

He doesn’t dodge, like she expected him to, and the sudden change in balance almost sends her toppling off the windowsill; he catches her before she can, one hand on her shoulder and one under her knee – for a minute he looks like he wants to pick her up, so she punches him lightly in the chest.

“Let go, love, I’m fine.”

He sets her back on the window-sill and does, reluctantly, before going back to his original stance. After a moment she realises he’s smiling, very slightly, a smile that she thinks vaguely he didn’t mean her to see. He gazes out of the window for a moment longer, the expression fading from his face. Tiredness has taken the edges from him, and he finally looks to be relaxing out of the poker-straight way he’s been holding himself ever since the trouble at Lost-Hope. It occurs to her that they both have ghosts there, that it has cast its shadow on both of them. She leaves the thought there, folding it away from view. The night is too quiet to go thinking of old ghosts, after all. One day she’ll have to face them, but not now, not when the night is so still and Tom’s words have such little bite.

He finally turns away from the window and sits down on the sill, against the other wall, pulling his feet up. He hasn’t any shoes on, and she jumps from the cold when he presses his toes to her ankle.

“Don’t be so nesh,” he says when she pulls away and she glares at him, a barb ready on her tongue. But there is a softness in his eyes, more genuine a softness than she has seen from him in far too long, and the barb melts before she can say it.

“I didn’t mean to wake you,” she says instead, looking away and roughening the edges of her voice so that it doesn’t sound quite as soft as her tone suggests.

“You didn’t,” he says, and after a long pause he adds “It took me a long time to learn to sleep in a real bed, too.”

She’s not quite sure that he realises he’s admitted it; his voice was low, slipping away from his usual crisp intonation and more towards the natural accent he only uses when he’s half asleep or half drunk. It softens her to hear, and she takes what he’s offered without acknowledgement. To take notice would be to make him deny it, and she hasn’t the energy for his games tonight. Instead she stretches her leg out again, just barely touching his calf with her toes.

He makes a noise that could be the start of her name but cuts himself off, leaning his head back against the wall and closing his eyes. She watches him for a moment, trying not to wonder what will drive them apart this time. The third time, it would be. A habit. She huffs a quiet laugh but shakes her head when he opens one eye and raises an eyebrow, and he shrugs to himself before closing it again.

This is the third time they’ve fallen together, she thinks. Which makes this a habit, too.


	6. Chapter 6

She can tell magic has taken its toll on Hurtfew. Corridors don’t lead where you would expect, and move freely; the light hangs oddly in the space, as if before a storm. When she rests her hand against the wall, she can feel it breathing.

She keeps getting stuck on the idea that John lives within these walls. They’ve been separate so long that it’s hard to believe they’re not, now. But he looks at her sometimes through the corner of his eye, not quite focusing, as if he can see through her. Norrell does the same. Strange, when he visits, doesn’t seem to see her at all.

She fingers the hagstone in her pocket but doesn’t take it out. What if it should show her what she thinks it will? What then?

The edge of her bed dips when she sits on it, but when she takes off her ring it disappears. She can feel the cloth of her dress against her skin, but not the pile of the rug beneath her feet. She can feel the warmth of the fire but not hear it burn, and she can hear the rain against the glass but can’t feel the drops landing on her hands.

“You look at me sometimes like you hate me,” Tom says, one night in Norrell’s library. Here, she can feel the warmth of him and the chill of a room in which the fire lies long dead; the backs of her calves press against the sopha that Tom has backed her into, and she can feel that but not the texture of his suit beneath her hands.

“I don’t,” she says, and he looks at her like he doesn’t believe her.

 

\--

 

The truth is, she still doesn’t know. She never has. And now she drifts through the halls of a house she doesn’t know, just like she did so long ago, and she has no dancer waiting at the water-gate this time. It is he that brought her here, he that held the inside of her wrist up to his lips and breathed life back into her veins.

(He had, with a little unsteadiness, run his fingertips across the scar at the top of her neck; she felt magic drip across her skin, but knew it wouldn’t take. _I can’t take it away_ , he’d said, _but then, it gives you character_. She’d reached up, taken his hands in hers. _I have character enough of my own, thank you._ )

 

\--

 

It is, again, the middle of the night; she has a small room near the library and its labyrinth, since the presence of magic seems to settle in her spine and steady her, and Tom has never visited until now. He doesn’t knock, and she would snap at him for that but he’s brought a bottle of brandy and two glasses. He pours hers first, and she perches on the dressing table while he paces. He barely seems to notice her; he certainly hasn’t said anything. But halfway through his glass he looks up and catches her eye. It’s the first time anyone has looked her in the eye all day, and she tries not to let that soften her.

“Joan,” he starts, and she puts her brandy down with a click that she feels through the table-top but doesn’t hear. Her name is reserved for serious matters; she’s stopped liking the way it sounds on his tongue.

“I’m not your absolution,” she says, and after staring at her for a long moment he walks out.

 

\--

 

She starts to seek out texture; she goes walking in the gardens barefoot, digging her toes into the dead and drying leaves, or stands by the kitchen door as a storm wuthers outside. The chill sinks into her bones, and the tips of her fingers go numb in the most wonderfully mundane way. John asks her about it, but she shrugs it off. Norrell asks, haltingly, with a look not unlike a startled deer. She shrugs it off then, too. Much to her chagrin, Strange spends three weeks with them in late autumn – he sees her once, and mistakes her for a servant.

Tom says nothing, and that night she leaves her ring on top of a book on his bedside table.

 

\--

 

Just before Christmas, Tom leaves. The amount of magic in the house takes a sudden dive, and she can’t hear anything for a week. John looks through her more often than not, and when he’s not doing that, he looks worried.

She can’t stand it, so she walks out of Hurtfew and into Fairie. Her cottage is waiting for her still, but her warding has been broken and she panics.

( _You just missed him_ , Edith says once she has established they’re all safe and unharmed. She asks who, but she thinks she already knows. Once her panic had subsided she realised she could taste sap in the air, and when Edith says _Tom_ , she nods, because who else could it have been.)

 

\--

 

“I can’t tell if I’m fading or not,” she says to him, in February when he returns, “But I feel stronger when you’re here.”

They are standing at the foot of the largest window in the library, where they always seem to meet. As always it’s the middle of the night, but the sky is newly clear and the moon is heavy; she worries at a loose nail in the floorboards with her bare toes, and she can smell the clean, crisp smell of the after-storm. 

“Shame,” he says, but his voice breaks in the middle, and when she reaches across and takes his hand he doesn’t let go.


End file.
